Britain and Ireland · Volume 36, The Grass, the Grain and the Border That Doesn’t Cut the Table

Boxty

Name: Boxty
Total time: 30 min
Yield: Makes about 8 pancakes
Cuisine: Ireland
Ingredients: 250 g raw potato, peeled and finely grated; 250 g cooked potato, mashed; 150 g plain flour; 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda; 200 ml buttermilk; a good pinch salt; as needed butter, for frying

The border midlands

Boxty, grated and mashed potato pancakes: a small stack of golden brown potato pancakes with a slightly speckled, dense cut surface visible on the top one, a pat of butter melting across the stack.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 30 minutes

Researched: 1 source cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

The name is said to derive from bacstaí, itself from arán bocht tí, "poor house bread," a pre-Famine dish. Distinctively, most boxty recipes combine raw grated potato, kept for texture, with cooked mashed potato, kept for softness, bound with flour, bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk, a double-textured technique found nowhere else in this chapter.

The border midlands

The Famine of 1845 to 1852 deserves real weight here, not a passing mention. What actually happened to Irish food culture as a result was near-total demographic and dietary collapse built on a single crop's failure, and its long shadow is the reason the potato's later re-embrace, colcannon, champ, boxty, reads as something closer to reclamation than simple continuity. But the single national story of universal hunger is itself a simplification worth resisting. Regina Sexton, UCC's food historian and a contributor to the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (Cork University Press, 2012), has researched an unpublished nineteenth-century recipe book alongside the letters of George Boole, UCC's first Professor of Mathematics, and found that food and dining culture at the end of the Famine "was far more complex than the stereotype of potatoes and little else," and that the Famine's impact in Cork specifically was "very mixed, where people starved while others had plenty." This chapter repeats her corrective deliberately: the Famine was not evenly experienced, and abundance persisted alongside starvation in the same counties, which is a harder and more honest story than a single national narrative can carry.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes about 8 pancakes. About 30 minutes.

Ingredients

250 g raw potato, peeled and finely grated
250 g cooked potato, mashed
150 g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
200 ml buttermilk
a good pinch salt
as needed butter, for frying

Method

Squeeze the grated raw potato hard in a clean cloth to remove as much liquid as possible.
Combine the raw and mashed potato with the flour, bicarbonate of soda and a good pinch of salt.
Work in the buttermilk gradually to a thick, spoonable batter.
Fry spoonfuls in butter on a griddle or heavy pan, 3 to 4 minutes a side, until golden and cooked through.
Serve hot, with butter, or alongside a fried breakfast.

What a modern chef changes

The starch concentrated properly, and the griddle heat controlled rather than guessed at.

Rung 1 and Rung 2

Method

Spread the squeezed raw grated potato thin on a tray and dehydrate at a low setting for 20 to 30 minutes before mixing it in, concentrating its starch further than squeezing alone achieves, for a boxty that holds together more cleanly in the pan.
Cook on a Big Green Egg fitted with a flat plancha plate, holding the surface at a calibrated temperature with a probe thermometer, for the same even conduction heat this chapter's whole soda-and-griddle family depends on.
Mix the batter only once the pan is already hot and ready, respecting the bicarbonate's fast reaction exactly as Rung 1 demands.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists